Leslie Parrish - Pitch Black

Sam vacillated between terror and utter rage as she and Alec tore through the night, heading for Baltimore. At first, he’d told her he wouldn’t take her to her mother’s place. He’d wanted to stay in D.C., to let the others handle it.

Yeah. Right.

She’d told him she was going, and the only way he would stop her was if he threw her out the window, and then he’d better hope she broke both her legs.

“Try her cell phone again,” Alec snapped, as if knowing she was on the verge of letting out a high, keening wail.

She did as he asked, even though she’d been calling every minute since reading that awful message on her site. Just like with every other call, she got her mom’s voice mail on the second ring. “It’s still turned off.” She dialed the house number, got the answering machine again, and left what was probably her tenth message.

“Do you have any idea where she was going, or who she was with?”

Leaning forward in her seat, as if urging the car to go even faster, Sam shook her head. “She played it so close to the vest. I had really given her hell about even considering online dating, so she obviously wasn’t going to talk to me about it.”

“But you’re certain she was planning to go out tonight with someone she had met online?”

“Like I said, she wasn’t confiding in me, but I knew she had a date, and was being incredibly secretive about it.”

“Because she knew you were against it.”

“Exactly.” Tension making her quiver, she added, “Plus, if she is meeting with Darwin, do you think he might have told her to keep the details hush-hush?”

“Yes, he probably would have.”

She hadn’t really wanted the confirmation. “Damn it, Alec, why is this happening? Is it really possible one blog post brought the wrath of this monster down on my mother’s head?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sounding frustrated and weary. “It seems so out of character for the Professor. He’s always been methodical and organized, cautious, taking weeks, months, once even a year between his crimes. For him to spin as wildly out of control as he seems to be this week-not only how frequently he’s attacking, but also taunting you the way he has-it seems like something else is at play here.”

“Like what?”

Alec didn’t say anything at first, merely staring out into the headlight-broken darkness, weaving the car in and out of traffic without ever slowing. She didn’t know if he was thinking about her question, or already knew the answer and didn’t want to say it out loud.

“Sam,” he finally said, “have you met anyone who’s made you uncomfortable or shown you particular attention in the past few weeks or months?”

She understood him immediately. “You think there’s more to this than Wednesday night’s rant. That he actually knows me.”

His slight nod acknowledged her suspicion.

Sam’s blood gushing hard in her veins, she still managed to keep her cool and think about his question, rather than come out with a quick, instinctive reply. “I’ve been a hermit,” she said, “as I think you already know. Honestly, Alec, I’ve met almost no new people since my divorce.”

He didn’t give up. “Okay, what about before that? It’s possible the Professor has been watching you for a long time, since before he came out to you on your site.”

That question was a whole lot easier to answer, though it certainly wouldn’t help them narrow things down. “My ex-husband and his family are socialites, running with the horse-breeding set up in Hunt Valley. I met hundreds of people in their circle, though I probably couldn’t recall the names of more than a dozen of them.”

Not even thinking about it, Sam flipped her phone open. Dialed. Heard her mother’s chipper message. Hung up.

“Rich, huh?”

“Filthy,” she replied, knowing he was asking about Samuel. “And as spoiled and selfish as you’d expect someone raised that way to be.”

He shrugged.

“What?”

“My family’s rich.”

She stared at him from across the car. Somehow, she’d already known the man came from money; he carried himself like it, and wore clothes that one wouldn’t expect on a federal employee’s salary. But he was about as different from her ex as any man could be, and she knew better than to judge him based on that one bad experience. “Point taken.”

Getting back to their conversation, he said, “So nobody stands out. Nobody condescending, for the most part, but a little too friendly toward you?”

“Not that I can remember,” she said, shaking her head. “Okay, so let’s say he knows me, and has known me for a while; why would he suddenly become so murderous toward me and people I care about? Why this… what did you call it? Acceleration?”

Even in the dimly lit car, she saw the way his hands tightened on the wheel. “We already assumed he was trying to scare you because he figured out you were working with us.”

“Going from scaring to slaughtering is a pretty big leap.”

“Not for someone like the Professor.”

Sam let out a slow, shaky breath, leaning back in her seat. It seemed too crazy to be believed, that one person’s very normal reaction-trying to help the authorities solve a murder-could be construed as some sort of betrayal of someone she didn’t even know.

But maybe you do know him. Alec’s idea wouldn’t leave her mind. As upsetting as it was to think she might have already had personal contact with a psychopath, it almost seemed better than thinking all of this had been caused by such a random thing, just some bastard cruising the Net, seeing her site, and getting angry about her blog.

“Okay, tell me which way to go,” Alec said, which was when she realized they had already reached Baltimore and were close to her mother’s place.

Sam gave him the directions, craning to see through the windshield. As they rounded the corner, her mother’s house became easy to spot. It was the one with all the cars parked outside. Including police vehicles with emergency lights spinning.

“Oh, no.”

He grabbed her hand. “Don’t. They’re here because Wyatt asked them to come check on her; it doesn’t mean anything.”

She kept reminding herself of that as they reached the house. She jumped out of the car before Alec had even cut the engine. When a uniformed officer stepped in front of her, she snapped, “This is my mother’s house.”

Alec, who had hurried after her, asked, “Anything?”

The officer shook his head. “No signs of life. Place is locked up tight as a drum, no lights on. Everything looks pretty normal. Do you have a key, miss?”

Sam nodded, waving her key ring at the man.

“Let the officers check it out first, Sam,” Alec said. She saw by the firm set of his mouth that this was non-negotiable.

Handing him the keys, she stood outside with Alec for what seemed to be the longest several minutes of her life. Finally, the cops who had gone in stepped back onto the front porch of the house Sam had grown up in, and beckoned to her.

“Nobody here, miss. Nothing appears out of place,” one of them said.

Good on one hand-her mother wasn’t lying murdered in her own living room.

Bad on the other-they had no idea where she was.

“Thank you,” she mumbled, telling herself no news was good news.

Alec stepped in. “The rest of my team should be showing up any minute; in the meantime, I’m going to have Ms. Dalton check her mother’s computer records to see if we can find out where she might be.”

Inside, Sam went straight to her old bedroom, now used as a small office. The desktop computer was turned off, and as she flipped the switch, she said, “Mom uses the same password, my dad’s middle name, for everything. She might have added a number on the beginning or the end, but it shouldn’t be hard to get into whatever dating program she’s gotten hooked up with.”